Argentina name team to take on the Lions

Felipe Contepomi has named his Argentina side to take on the British and Irish Lions on Friday at the Aviva Stadium, with captain Julian Montoya starting just days after losing in the Gallagher Premiership final.

The departing Leicester Tigers hooker will lead a side that contains eight players from the Premiership in the starting XV, as they wait for their players still competing in the Top 14 to join the squad.

The match will be the first meeting between the two sides since 2005, where the Pumas drew with Sir Clive Woodward’s Lions 25-25.

It will also be the first time that the Lions will play a match on Irish soil, before they fly to Perth over the weekend.

Fixture

British & Irish Lions

British & Irish Lions

24 - 28

Full-time

Argentina

All Stats and Data

Having only had a week with each other, and still without some of their star players, Contepomi discussed the difficulties his squad have faced in the build-up to the match.

“It’s a challenge, definitely, for both teams, but for us, we haven’t been together for seven months and getting together in two training sessions with a lot of new faces has been a challenge,” he said.

“But the guys have been magnificent and they have made a lot of effort to grab hold of that new information and the more experienced players are trying to take them through with all that information and go into training with a lot of intensity.

“I think we are very pleased with how they adapted to their first week for the newcomers.

“In terms of preparing a game against a team that you don’t know what they’ll fire, for us, it’s very good because we need to focus on ourselves. Having new players in the group, it has been good to really focus on what we want to do, how we want to do it, for them to start understanding or living the habits that we want to instil in our group.

“We know all their players, and we expect them to be playing hard. They could miss a bit of cohesion, or not, because they are such top-level players, so they can click in one moment.

“So we expect a very tough and encouraging game.”

Argentina XV
15. Santiago Carreras (vc)
14. Rodrigo Isgro
13. Lucio Cinti
12. Justo Piccardo
11. Ignacio Mendy
10. Tomas Albornoz
9. Gonzalo Garcia
1. Mayco Vivas
2. Julian Montoya (c)
3. Joel Sclavi
4. Franco Molina
5. Pedro Rubiolo
6. Pablo Matera (vc)
7. Juan Martin Gonzalez
8. Joaquin Oviedo

Replacements
16. Bautista Bernasconi
17. Boris Wenger
18. Francisco Coria Marchetti
19. Santiago Grondona
20. Joaquin Moro
21. Simon Benitez Cruz
22. Matias Moroni
23. Santiago Cordero